Tom's Journal

Geeks and politics

The magic box was real

February 7th, 2009

If you remember the the 2001 movie Josie and the Pussycats included the suggestion that the music industry has a magic box that turned any song into a hit by fixing any mistakes and inserting subliminal messages to buy, buy, buy!

It turns out that since 1998, this has mostly been true. Well, not the subliminal messages, but digitally fixing off-pitch singers.

Radiohead, while they were working on the Kid A album in 1999, started experimenting with AutoTune, reading song lyrics into it in a flat non-melodic speaking voice to see what kind of random melody the computer would assign. The title track (Kid A) is the most obvious use of the shtick.